


Casida de las palomas oscuras

by Dnjungle



Category: Alguien tiene que morir | Someone Has to Die (TV)
Genre: Dreams, F/M, M/M, Multi, Original Character(s), Period-Typical Homophobia, Translation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:00:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27590356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dnjungle/pseuds/Dnjungle
Summary: Not exactly a fix-it
Relationships: Alonso Aldama/Gabino Falcón, Alonso Aldama/Gabino Falcón/Lázaro, Gabino Falcón/Lázaro, Mina/Lázaro
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	1. Alonso

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [黑鸽子之歌](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27590281) by [Dnjungle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dnjungle/pseuds/Dnjungle). 



> Huge thanks to Hattie for betaing!!  
> Title is taken from Lorca's eponymous peom.  
> This fic comprises of three parts, mimicking the form of Casidas. If you're interested in this poetic form, please google Qasida or Qaṣīdah.  
> Cheers.

**Alonso**

The footpath led Alonso Aldama slowly up the hillside. Turning onto a trail, the laughter of young couples rambling about after dinner faded away, and the breeze of autumn night flowed through the pines and cypresses in a chill that left Alonso to wrap his overcoat tightly around himself and bury his face in his collar. He wasn’t as fit as he used to be. Amparo Falcón’s bullet had gone through his right arm, embedding 35 lead pellets in his lungs. To help him wake up as quickly as possible from anesthesia of the surgery, one of the best surgeons of Madrid slapped him twice in the face and told him, who was at the time half awake and salivating uncontrollably, “we saved your life, kid. Now you’re going to have to start learning to write with your left hand.” A year later, his left hand writing skill had improved slightly, and the rehabilitation of his right hand was at no point neglected (it was all done quietly at night in the solitude of his bedroom); he had lost weight, which he didn’t have much to begin with, that people who knew him could hardly recognize him; and he officially bade farewell to football for a couple of quick steps would overwhelm his weakened lungs.

During this somewhat hectic year, his mother fussed around him like a bumblebee, monitoring his every move, even making him accompany her to floral lessons, lest he should get into trouble again. His father, who had defrayed the cost of Gregorio Falcón’s medical bills and more than generously offered another 200,000 pesetas to the man, seemed to be particularly fascinated by the work in the factory and had never mentioned “the accident in the woods” again. Eventually Gregorio stopped the pursuit of the case against Alonso and left the Aldamas a grisly note about “not to get involved in another man’s family business ever again”, and then turned to pay his undivided attention to the search of his missing wife and son. This would mean there was only one persistent inquirer left for Alonso to confront, and that was his ever-loving, charitable sister. Before Alonso could get out of bed and hide away, Cayetana would sit by his bed for hours, just stare at him, and sometimes, when she was in a good mood, shower him with questions like “why did you protect that faggot?”. His childhood friend card stopped working after a few rounds, so he would ask his mother for help when Cayetana refused to leave him alone. And soon a furious Belén would show up and chase his sister away with a lecture that no one was to interrupt his recovery.

By the time Alonso could walk a mile without break or assistance, marriage was immediately put on the agenda. While Belén’s argument was that he was not getting any younger, Santos was more straightforward, “In your physical condition, we’re lucky enough if anyone is willing to marry you at all.” Cayetana, for her part, presented him with a photo album composed of pictures of all the matrimonial candidates while examining his face for any traces of reluctance. Even though no one in the family mentioned Gabino Falcón's name, Alonso was more or less suspicious that his family was onto something. So he did his best to conform to their vision of the future and rejoined his old life of lies.

From an early age, Alonso had often been caught up in the illusion that he was the last soldier standing after a fierce battle and had lived, for more than twenty years, with this figment of imagination which was beginning to tumble under the weight of life. Just as this chronic disappointment slowly nipped at his sanity, a letter from Paris arrived, and judging from the envelope, was sent by some mysterious woman living in the 19th arrondissement. Alonso curiously opened the letter right in the foyer, then walked back to his bedroom with unusual haste, leaned panting over his desk, and with a quivering pen in his left hand, wrote an askew line of crooked words in the margins of the letter. After finishing his scribble, he studied the paper again as his whole body trembled slightly, tear streaming down his face. But instead of allowing himself to cry, he locked his bedroom door and ignited the paper with his lighter. He tossed the burning letter into the ashtray, clutching the envelope as the cryptic message on the paper was engulfed by the flames. Only two people in the world now knew the contents of the letter, he contemplated with certainty, and the cryptographic symbols in it… he dried his tears roughly and laughed lightly: Gabino had not forgotten the codes they had invented together as children. For the past ten years, Alonso had obsessively used this cipher system to write things he didn’t want Cayetana to find out. He was convinced deeply and furiously that he was the only one proficient in this encryption, that Gabino, who was far across the Atlantic, had forgotten all about it long ago. Now, laying in his bad, chest heaving violently, face reddening from excitement, he revisited Gabino’s laconic words in his mind – I said I wouldn’t leave you all alone. I’m waiting for you in Paris.

Alonso spent the entire afternoon trying to organize a reply but to little avail. There was so much he wanted to say, some of it was feelings that he was too embarrassed to put into words, some of it were things that cannot be summed up in any way. At night, he made an excuse of going out to dinner with friends and hailed a taxi to head into the city. Before leaving Belén reminded him not to drink, said it wasn’t good for his wounds, he agreed ostensibly then told the driver to drive right up to a liquor store. A minute or two passed, he got back into the taxi with his harvest (a bottle of Smirnoff vodka), they then drove to Casa de Campo. Alonso took a big gulp of vodka before getting out, thinking that if a wound refused to heal after a year, it would be by definition categorized as a belly button.

He carried the bottle in the inside pocket of his overcoat and walked along the track to the top of Garabitas hill. He panted as he walked up the slopes, stopping occasionally to take a sip of vodka, and after forty minutes he finally reached the cypress groves where he had visited a year ago. This time he was in an utterly different mood, not even seeing the looming silhouette of men in the darkness could bother him one bit. He marched deeper into the woods and was greeted by a man with an obscene smile and unruly, wanton hands, whom he dismissed with a wave of his hand. He felt more at ease than ever, looking at the human-formed shadows in these woods with arrogance and compassion – I’m about to be rid of the shackles of this endless night! A ticket to Paris is the distance between me and freedom!

With his mind addled by alcohol, Alonso stumbled, almost losing his bearing. He sat down under a cypress tree and drank one gulp after another, staring out at the large heather bush not far away. He tried, there in the stillness of the night, to come up with a good reason to persuade his father to let him go to Paris – maybe he’d tell him that he wanted to go there to expand their business… No, that would never have worked… God, he could count all the French he could speak with one hand.

Suddenly, his thoughts were interrupted by a rustling sound. He watched the way he had come with wariness, but there was nothing there. Looking around, his eyes fell on the bushes. He held his breath as he peered through the sparse foliage of the heather, and gradually the silhouette behind the shrubs became undeniably clear, as real and unreal as an impressionist painting. He wanted to get up and go around to the other side of the bush to find out what was going on, but the fear of causing disturbance stopped him. In the end he just sat there stiffly, holding the bottle close to his chest.

He heard a faint sign and felt the sense of shame coursing through his veins. Face hot and throat dry, he continued to watch, trying to discern the movement behind the bush: it was a pair of men, there was no mistaking it, one of them had short military-style hair, the other one, who was lean and muscular, was lying prostrate between the former’s legs, hips moving lazily. After a moment, the man below shifted his position, straddling his lover with his back facing Alonso, revealing his broad shoulder and back – Alonso’s heartbeat accelerated. He liked that sheer masculinity about men, and he especially liked that about Gabino. He remembered that time he visited Falcón's family home (he was seventeen, probably younger) and caught a glimpse of a picture of Gabino on the small table in the foyer. That night he dreamed of his childhood playmate, who had almost grown to manhood with limbs so long and slender they were nowhere to be placed. He dreamed about them being in the woods together, looking for cicada sloughs. Gabino had always had sharp eyes. He who had a smaller stature would climb on Gabino’s shoulders to pick the sloughs from tall trees they couldn’t have reached without cooperation. He could almost feel the shoulders strong and steady beneath his feet, supporting his weight in his dream. When he woke up, an unspeakable sense of loss attacked him, he felt like an amputee who had just dreamed of a distant past of himself running and playing with able-bodied extremities. In the years that followed a wave of anger often came over him whenever he thought of Gabino. The irrational anger also raised his libido to an unusual level. The things they did in the club’s armory room pestered him. He would think of how naïve they were (but in the meantime so intuitive and willful), sweaty hands in each other’s pants, lips and teeth knocking together frenetically. Gabino was right, he didn’t act like a kid. Gabino merely initiated a kiss, he was the one who made it irreversible. To this day, Alonso still wondered what he and Gabino could be if they hadn’t been interrupted by a knock on the door.

If they shared such a past, Gabino might not fall in love with Lázaro. Alonso gritted his teeth at the thought - What kind of man would fornicate with his friend’s mother? But as time passed, Alonso began to try to understand what Gabino saw in Lázaro: 1) Lázaro was a dancer, and Gabino had been interested in art since he was a child; 2) Lázaro was in decent shape. Alonso ticked off the “3)” written in his mind because jealousy consumed his patience. He would never admit that Lázaro was one of the triggers for his last visit to these woods. Curiosity and affection were two completely different things.

The two men behind heather bushes were absorbed in their business, the overlapping gasps of breath growing harsher to Alonso’s ears. His mind travelled to what he could do in Paris. He missed the smell of cheap tobacco on Gabino’s neck. Would they sleep together? After he realized how he felt about Gabino, he had made peace with his own desires, and the sight of coitus in front of him provided just the right amount of inspiration – he imagined Gabino riding his cock, embracing him with his long arms, their bodies intertwined, muscles tense…

No. Gabino had only forgiven him for what he did out of a friendship from years ago. And one should never confuse friendship with love.

Alonso gulped down more vodka, his head tilted due to drunkenness and he nearly fell headlong into the grass beside him. He managed to straighten his body, but he could barely keep his eyes open. As he slipped into the dream, he thought of Lázaro. Could Gabino still be in love with Lázaro after everything they’d been through?

In his dream, Gabino and Lázaro walked side by side through the damp streets of Paris, shoulders touching, laughing and jostling playfully, and once in a while stopping outside a crowded café for a few bites of croissant over coffee. They stayed in the same hotel room. When they weren’t in bed, they were planning the next day’s trip together, and when they were in bed, Gabino was always the one to compromise. Alonso dreamed about Gabino lying on his back and Lázaro on top of him, moving as if he was dancing. In the second half of the dream, Alonso himself took Lázaro’s place, and Lázaro was behind him, cock buried inside him, controlling the rhythm of his thrusts into Gabino. Gabino clasps his arms around Alonso but was kissing Lázaro. Alonso had never before experienced anything like this, so close to pleasure and yet at the same time so irritable and sad.

He was startled awake by the end of the dream as he saw a pigeon with its tail feather trimmed off straining into the air and heard, right after it gained some balance, two gunshots.


	2. Gabino

**Gabino**

Gabino Falcón lowered the brim of his hat and passed by a few cheerful-looking students. It was the longest day of the year. The sky of nine o’clock at night glowed with brilliant color. He got off the bus at Sagasta station, walked a hundred meters south along Mejía Lequerica street, then turned west to arrive at No.15 Apodaca Street. Striding straight into the café sat on the corner of the street, Gabino spotted David who was waiting in the window seat as promised.

David was wearing a suit and tie which were different from the ones he wore the day they first met, though his occupation was still unclear to Gabino. As soon as Gabino settled into the narrow chair, the man, who was in his early thirties and had a constant countenance of frowning, spoke up, “I hope this won’t take long. I have to go back to work overtime.”

“You might not want to go back after you hear this.” Gabino said discreetly, hovering over the small table between them.

“Look. Whatever sappy little stories Carlos told you, I don’t give a crap. Me and him haven’t talked in three or four years.” David said hurriedly.

That statement swept Gabino off his feet. Before he had time to respond, David asked him in a low voice, “Where did you meet anyway?” he lit a cigarette, his thighs shaking involuntarily, “You’re not his type.”

Gabino answered honestly, “We were in the same cell.”

David snorted almost inaudibly, “I heard he got caught. Everyone in the club was afraid that he was going to snitch. But that doesn’t concern me anymore. I left that world a long time ago.” David pulled out his wallet, taking a small photo out of it, “See? This is my daughter.”

Gabino took the photo and swallowed hard. The infant in the picture smiled innocently, as if she knew that she was free of the entanglement and falsehood outside this photo. Taking a deep breath, Gabino blurted out the rehearsed words, “Listen, the one thing Carlos made me promise was to find you. He wanted you to hide as soon as possible. The guards were torturing him every day, trying to pry names out of him, and when I left, he told me that he couldn’t hold on much longer. Later, I asked around trying to find out where he was. The police said he had been sent to Badajoz. Then I went to the prison in Badajoz to look for him and learned instead that on the way to Badajoz, Carlos, along with several other wrongly imprisoned men, had tried to escape to Portugal. The civil guards reached the border before them. He died soon after the arrest. Some say he was killed by the gendarmeries; others say he died of typhoid…”

David fell silent, the cigarette between his fingers burning quietly. Gabino locked eyes with him dolorously, barely able to bear the astoundment in his eyes. “Can I have a cigarette?” Gabino said abruptly. David pushed the cigarette case over, his face weirdly deprived of all expression.

Gabino placed the photo on the table, lit a cigarette and added softly, “When I was in the cell with Carlos, he gave the good bed to me…” He studied David’s comely features, trying to find traces of affection.

After a moment, David said crudely, “What does that have anything to do with me? I told you, we haven’t talked in years –”

If Gabino had been hesitant about telling David of Carlos’s love for him, he was decisive now. As if to punish the man before him for his cold-bloodedness, he interrupted David, “Carlos still loves you. You must know this.”

David stared at Gabino for a short while, his eyes briefly wandering to the front door, and for a second Gabino thought he was going to get up and escape.

Finally, David asked calmly: “Is that what he told you?”

“Yes.” Gabino’s voice hardened, “I know you have moved on from the past. It’s your choice. I have no right to judge. But I do have the right to ask you to show some respect for people who make their choices to lead an honest life.”

David listened with a raised eyebrow and put away his daughter’s photo, then he took a big drag of his cigarette, his face still unmoved, “The thing you don’t know is that in all those years we were together, there wasn’t a day we didn’t fight. There wasn’t a single piece of china in the apartment because he loved to break things when he threw a tantrum. There was a time when he threatened to call the police to lock me up. And when he wasn’t pissed, he wanted to go to Morocco to have a fake wedding. We decided to break up on the same day. I told him I wanted a normal life. He told me he met someone else in the bar. After he moved out, we passed each other by twice on the streets, and both times we acted like strangers, didn’t say a word. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this way, but every time I see him, I can’t help but think ‘that could’ve been my life’. That thought bugged me to a point that it makes me wonder when two people whose fates are so closely tied together fall in love with each other, if what they are in love with is the mere reflections of their own lives. And when those reflections disappear, life no longer has references, as if the next step to take was nothing more than groping and probing into laws of all beings. It’s a mawkish thing to say, but I do believe so. Anyway, I bet Carlos has the worst sense of timing you’ll ever see in anyone. He never said he loved me when we were together and now, he’s gone, he sent you here to torment me…” David said, tears suddenly gathering in his eyes. He stopped talking, turning his face to the side stubbornly, lips pressing tightly together.

As though responding internally to the fates and reflections David had spoken of, a feeling of desolation weighed down on Gabino’s shoulders, and he realized now in astonishment that this weight had been there for quite some time. He murmured meditatively, “But will there ever be a right timing for us?”

Gabino and David parted ways outside the café, the latter left without saying goodbye, striding across the intersection with arched back like an ill man. Gabino watched as his figure receded down the street, feeling as if he was observing a site of ruin, a pile of colonnades from centuries ago collapsed to the ground.

The next morning, Gabino bought a one-way ticket to Barcelona. He was desperate to leave this city, or to be more precise, this country which in his eyes devoured everything he cared about, and was on the verge of destroying himself. Secret police roamed the station, checking credentials randomly. It seemed to Gabino that people measured each other suspiciously, varnishing their anxiety with twisted smiles. No one had a chance of freedom. Madrid was like an irredeemable cesspool, and at the bottom of which lied millions of souls that slowly decomposed into something beyond recognition.

Gabino’s neighbours on the train were two Swiss tourists and a young maid traveling north for work. He tried to talk to them, because reading the newspaper provided by the attendants, which was full of brazen propaganda of Franco’s political achievements, was a total waste of time. The Swiss’s French accent gave Gabino a real headache, while the maid, thrilled about her first train ride, kept asking him to translate those irrelevant questions she had for the two tourists.

“What’s your business in Barcelona?” the girl eventually turned her attention to Gabino.

“I’m planning to see the city, and after that, taking a train to France.” Gabino said truthfully.

The girl frowned, “You have to watch out for the French. They snatch our jobs and they always talk in blasphemy.”

Gabino laughed. She then asked, “What are you going to France for?”

“I haven’t decided yet. If I can’t get a job at the galleries, I’d probably be an accountant.”

She looked puzzled, “So you are not coming back?”

“Yes.” Gabino paused, “I have too many bad memories of Madrid,”

“But people always come back.”

“Not those who are determined to leave, no.

“Even the escaped Communists are coming back. I’ve seen with my own eyes –”

Gabin covered her mouth immediately. He looked around alarmingly and was slightly relieved to find all the passengers were focusing on their own business. He admonished her sternly, “You can’t say things like that. Not out loud.” The girl gave him an aggrieved look, and after a moment, pulled out her sewing kit from her purse and got busy.

The long ride had only just begun. Gabino didn’t want to leave things on a bad note. He said in a glum tone, “Those people have unfinished business. I have none.”

“What about your family and friends?” the girl instantly put down her needlework and asked.

Gabino was silent for a second, “Everyone I care about doesn’t care about me, and everyone I don’t care about wants me dead.”

She looked at him with concern, “My mother always says there’s nothing that time can’t fix. You won’t be worried about it this time next year.”

“I used to think that ten years was long enough to resolve any conflicts. But I was wrong. My troubles have only gotten worse over time.” After that, Gabino’s gaze fell to the floor apologetically, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be such a helpless bore.”

The girl shrugged, “I’m sure there are exceptions to my mother’s theory. Anyway, I’ll pray for you.”

They spent several minutes without saying a word, then Gabino broke the silence by saying, “I met a guy who said something about life and reflections that I didn’t quite understand, but I have a vague feeling that it must be important to him. I was there to deliver the news of his former lover’s death.” He stopped to contemplate the wording and eventually surrendered to the palest language he could summon up, even though he knows it’s puerile and inaccurate, “He broke up with his lover years ago and now has a family of his own. But I know things are not over for him. That’s what I’m worried about – never being able to completely leave my past behind.”

The girl returned to her needlework, but her words came out firmly, “Sounds like you have someone you can’t let go of.”

Gabino shifted his gaze to the moving landscape outside the window and muttered, “You could say that.”

“But do you really want to say goodbye to the past?”

Gabino thought about it and said, “I want to start a new life. But I’m not sure what that means exactly. I’m not even really looking forward to a life in Paris, whereas just a few months a go I could feel it beckoning me.”

“Maybe you had different expectations back then? Maybe you had someone you could travel with?”

Gabino laughed bitterly at her seemingly unintentional question, “Not only did I have someone I could call a companion at the time, but I thought I had everything I could ever want. Then I realized that love was like an everlasting vacation from reality – I greeted it with novelty and joy, but it shook the belief I had for life.”

“I don’t know much about love. But I wish I could give you some advice, like those relationship quizzes on American magazines.”

“I guess those magazines never tell you that love is actually a ramshackle, mistakenly-deified fiction, stacked up by luck, sexual desire, greed and self-righteousness.”

The girl didn’t look like she agreed with him. She turned away to sew a couple of stitches on the fabric and seemed to be considering a rebuttal. A few moments passed, she exclaimed, “Oh no,” and then pushed the fabric aside in exasperation, “Great. Now I’ll have to unpick the dozens of stitches I just did and start over. Why didn’t anyone tell me that a train was no place for delicate work!”

Gabino glanced at the fabric placed on her knees and couldn’t see anything wrong with it. She said to herself grumblingly, “The factory workers only taught me how to arrange stitches in a beautiful and elegant way, but they never told me how to start over as soon as possible. They would say things like ‘Only the frivolous ones take shortcuts.’ to discourage you from asking questions. It’s terribly unfair, isn’t it?”

Gabino replied thoughtfully, “Perhaps you do know something about love.”

Gabino spent two day and one night in Barcelona. The plan he and Lázaro made last autumn was to stay there for at least two weeks before heading to France. Travelling alone had stirred a feeling in him of unease and exhaustion. He walked along the Avenida Diagonal, the order and perfection of the city surprised and frightened him. The design of Sagrada Família irrevocably worsened his fear. He stood before the west façade of the cathedral, which was then under construction, and felt as if witnessing a creature made of basalt and granite soaring from hell. The next day he temporarily found peace on the beach, and by night he fled the city which was in his opinion dominated by aberrant and horrendous aesthetics. On the train to Paris, he curled up in his narrow berth and tried to finish Sartre’s La Nausée. Roquentin’s mental condition had reminded him of his own mindset, and through out the reading, he felt psychologically provoked by Sartre’s depiction of a man on the limbo of destruction, which in a way planted an image in his head that himself was dragged through a clammy and schizophrenic mire towards an eventual, if not impossible, elevation. Hours of reading left him sweaty and lost, even causing him to miss the moment when the train crossed the border. He let out a sign of relief when he closed the book. Taking the hard bread he had bought the night before out of his luggage, he had little appetite, so he put the food away, got back on the bunk bed, turning back and forth wearily to the loud snoring of the man on the top bunk.

By the time he finally checked in at the hotel, Gabino had been robbed of all the feelings towards Paris. All he wanted was a shower and some sleep. A fever broke the next day, confined him to his bed. This paroxysm of illness was particularly hard on his mentality, because it had been years since the last time he was sick with no one there to care for him. It took three days for the fever to go down, and it was a week after his arrival that he gradually regained the energy to start the exploration of Paris. In the third week, he moved into an apartment above an Algerian-owned grocery store in the 19th arrondissement. The three-month rent nearly cost all the money he had earned by doing accounts for a diary factory back in Madrid (the good news was that pesetas were still worth something in France). A few days later he found a job as a substitute teacher at a private high school in suburb Paris, teaching Latin and economics.

Ha saved up his salary and bought a second-hand bicycle. With great enthusiasm he rode to Le Louxor theater to see a new production of María Félix titled French Cancan. He loved her costume in the film and the part where she did the belly dance, and was out-and-out amazed by her (wicked) beauty and vitality.

From the vendor outside the theater he bought two cigarettes. Standing by the Boulevard de Magenta, he listened to the nasal laughter from passers-by and watched the way they walk with hands in their pockets. The memories of Madrid suddenly struck him. His gaze flitted helplessly over the strange faces, as if he had looked through the eyes of Roquentin and captured the true nature of loneliness, or as David had lamented, had he discovered the path that fell outside of logic and common sense.

The next morning Gabino wrote two letters, one to Madrid, the other to Mexico City.


	3. Lázaro & Mina

**Lázaro & Mina**

Lázaro lay on his side, hugging Mina tightly from behind. He moved for about a minute before it occurred to him that she was already asleep. Ever since they had started the renovation of the dance studio, Mina had developed the ability of falling asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. She was busy ordering mirrors and Marley floors during the day (with money borrowed from her sisters), overseeing the remodeling of the interior, and for the purpose of saving cost of labor, painting the doors and cleaning the window panes by herself. Lázaro, who was on a single crutch, tried to help her out with the work. She declined his help by sending him to print the leaflets, all the while didn’t even bother to look at him.

Lázaro sat on the edge of the bed, stared at Mina’s sleeping face, at the curve of her skinny wrists and hips, and sighed lightly, then put on his pajama pants and waddled into the living room for his midnight dance practice.

The furniture in the living room were pushed aside to stand next to the suitcases which they brought back from Madrid but never unpacked. He decided to warm up with the most basic moves, but a simple grand plié was enough to cause dull pain in his left calf. The recovery from the gunshot wound took him more than six months (the journey from Madrid to Mexico City had led to a serious infection that almost cost his left leg), and the muscle on his right leg was also subject to some degree of atrophy due to lack of practice. His doctor was optimistic about the convalescence, but out of professionalism, didn’t forget to warn him against putting too much pressure on his legs. After some harmless quarrel with Mina, he tenaciously picked up the habit of practicing late at night despite her objections.

Lázaro made it through eight respective sets of first position and second position jumps, and was forced to come to a halt as the pain in his calf had exacerbated. He held on to the chair next to him to catch a breath and then proceeded to complete five sets of changement before falling heavily to the ground and landing on his knees, which he hugged painfully as he curled into a ball and clenched his teeth for fear of waking Mina up. Later he lifted himself up to the chair and found that he had left a ridiculous human-shaped sweat stain on the floor. He chuckled bitterly at the sight and turned to the practice of an Adagio combo that he had developed himself.

He finished his training at three o’clock and hobbled tiredly back to bed, satisfied with the progress he had made. Twenty minutes later he was still awake, mind occupied by thoughts and ideas, heart beating fast and heavy. Since the return from Spain with Mina, things in Mexico seemed to have changed. At first, they were living in the house of one of Mina’s sisters’ in Mexico City until they discovered that the private detective sent by Gregorio never stopped looking for them. They moved to Guadalajara in a panic and settled in the toylike house they were now living in. During the two months that they were forced to stay indoors, they formed a routine of daily intercourse between fits of sleep, and when they were finally reminded of a world existing outside of each other, they decided to open a dance school. That day they walked into an instrument shop, and when Mina sat down before a 1932 Mason & Hamlin to play the Autumn Song by Tchaikovsky, Lázaro just wanted to drop his crutch and dance. The shop owner naturally thought of them as mother and son, and with respect and admiration, stood by the piano and watched Mina play. On their way home, Mina and Lázaro exchanged ideas about the school they were about to open and run together. Lázaro said that Mina would be the perfect accompanist for the ballet class, to which Mina responded in mock seriousness, “You are going to pay me full wages, you do realize that, right?”

Recollecting the days and nights he spent with Mina, Lázaro felt that he had never been so happy. Even with a bad leg dragging behind him, he still thought it was worth it. On the rickety bed they shared, he closed his eyes, seeing ever so clearly the wildflowers blooming in their yard and Mina’s fine, deft fingers.

Mina snapped out of her nightmare and turned frantically to check if Amparo’s shotgun really had left a deadly wound on Lázaro’s bare chest. His even breaths calmed her down slightly. She struggled to get out of bed, inevitably feeling a soreness spreading all over her body. She wasn’t that young and lively thing she used to be; dark blotches began to creep up onto her skin in an imperceptible way; her muscles weak and her joints popping during sex. She experienced bouts of confusion while facing the mirror – what are you doing here? This is not your life.

Lázaro woke up. She could hear the sound of him scuffing to the bathroom and turning on the shower. She cracked eggs into a pan, then leisurely walked out the front door to check the mailbox. Shortly she walked back inside with the mails and leaned against the kitchen sink, her eyes scanning over the utility bills and the invoice for the studio mirror and pausing on a letter, on which the postmarks and labels indicated that it had been sent from Paris to her sister’s address in Mexico City and then forwarded to Guadalajara. Glancing down to find the sender, she suppressed a cry, but her eyes immediately turned red. With trembling hands, she tore open the envelope, turning away from the direction of the bathroom, and read the letter over and over again.

That’s when Lázaro shouted from the bathroom, “What’s that smell?”

Startled out of her trance, Mina turned the stove off hurriedly. She stared at the mess of a breakfast in the pan but all she could think of was the letter: I was a failure as a mother.

That morning Mina sent Lázaro out to the nearby grocery. Alone in the house, she opened the luggage they had brought from Madrid. With tears in her eyes, she rummaged through the contents as if she was exploring another person’s life. Setting the clothes and jewelries aside, the maps and guidebooks of Paris, London and Vienna made her dizzy. She rushed into the bathroom and threw up the few things she had in her stomach. Before Lázaro got back, she put the luggage back together and positioned them in the exact spot they had been. Later on, she argued with Lázaro over the wrong kind of spice he had bought. Neither of them spoke again that morning.

This is not your life – the thought wouldn’t stop harassing Mina. Sitting alone at the second-hand piano in the studio, she pondered her relationship with Lázaro and somehow an idea, which soon became a firm belief, arose from her consciousness – the love for a fellow countryman in a foreign land is a love of special nature, like two chords that dispel the silence, the two lovers share a past and a present which is incomparably distinct and homogeneous; and to return to hometown is to plunge into a tumultuous mariachi song, the two chords get to secure a place in a piece of music after a lifetime of exile while in the meantime crumpled by a feeling of lost in the din of sound.

She could hear Lázaro approaching her from behind – the scratch of his crutch and feet rubbing against the floor was like his new identity – He leaned his crutch by the piano stool and sullenly apologized for this morning’s squabble.

Mina examined the black and white keys before her and said, “Gregorio taught me how to play the Spanish Dances. We used to sit at the piano and play for hours on end.”

A long time passed before Lázaro said quietly, “Do you miss life in Madrid?”

Mina turned around and took his hand but didn’t look him in the eye, “I don’t want anything to do with that part of life the moment he pointed his gun at us.”

When the last piece of mirror was fixed to the wall and the last groups of workers left with their tool boxes sitting on their shoulders, Lázaro threw his crutch on the floor and plopped down like a child, hands reaching out to Mina. She hesitated, then lay down on the dusty and footprinted vinyl floor next to him. They stayed there for a while then held each other close and kissed. Mina moved carefully on top of Lázaro, her knees and the back of her dress covered in dust. She kissed him again while sinking down onto his cock, her eyes remained resting on the mirror across from her. The reflection in the mirror looked back at her in an indifferent and passive gaze. Lust streamed through her body like wax, sizzling hot then solidified again. She heard the pained moans coming from her chest, as if a howl had been shattered into pieces of echo as light as falling snow.

About two months later, as Mina and Lázaro came home from teaching evening class at the dance studio, he said that he felt like a broke gambler watching a card game when he watched those kids dance. Mina didn’t say a word, just hugged him and let him cry on her shoulder. They had sex as usual. On their bed, an acute feeling of asphyxiation suddenly seized Mina. She asked Lázaro to pause for a moment, but he didn’t hear her or realize his weight was crushing her. As if she had accidentally lost her balance in the swimming pool, her legs stirred twice in vain. The subtle change of position redirected Lázaro’s penis to an uncomfortable angle, causing Mina to gasp in pain. “Let go of me,” she panted, “I can’t breathe.”

Lázaro finally noticed that something was wrong and collapsed onto his side of the bed. “Are you okay?” he asked, his hand rested first on her bony chest, then retreated in apprehension.

Mina turned away from him and let out a struggling wheeze, trying to fight the urge to cry and scream.

Instead of continuing what they were doing, they put on their overcoats and went out to a restaurant. Mina sat tormented on the cold chair, unable to concentrate on the letters on the menu. When the waiter came over to take their orders, she barely mustered the energy to point at a random dish with a shaking finger.

Lázaro ordered a beer, his habit of drinking had been off and on since their return from Madrid. When they were alone in their seats, both of them were looking through the window, eyes fixing on the street. As the traffic outside ebbed and flew, Lázaro reached for his beer and took a small sip, the air between them suspended with the possibility of a conversation. Silence, like a blunt knife, gashed Mina’s willpower wide open and left her dissolved in a sudden wave of tears. She wanted to ask questions and apologize, but didn’t know to whom. She remembered Lázaro lying beside her in the forest back in Madrid and saying with relief, “There’s no going back.” She looked at Lázaro for consolation and found on him the same tear-filled eyes as hers under the dim light.

“You’re leaving me, aren’t you?” Lázaro asked in a choked voice.

“I miss him so much…God…I miss him so much…” Mina said painfully.

Lázaro clutched her hand from across the table, “But we didn’t do anything wrong, did we?”

“Of course not, Lázaro…I told you I would never regret meeting you. It’s just I can see it clearly now, that we have nothing left but this love.”

“That’s not true…we have the studio and…” Lázaro paused, realizing the futility of this argument. When he decided to speak again, he was in a desperate state, “I saw the letter you hid. If you’re going to Paris, I will go with you.”

Mina dried her tears and said slowly, “You have to understand, Lázaro, I can’t bear the life without him.”

“It’ll be alright. I’ll talk to him. He wants that too. We’ll talk it through.”

“Oh…Lázaro…what have I done…” Mina trembled as she confessed, “I saw the way he looked at you but I still stole you away from him… I failed to protect him ten years ago and I still do…”

Lázaro got up and held her with despair, not letting her go even when their clothes were soaked with tears. He kissed her forehead and told her she was a good mother. “We’ll start over. Trust me. Every love has to reconcile with its past. As long as we are together, things will be okay.” He said firmly.

Mina didn’t reply. They ate their dinner without exchanging another word and went home together. With no one to turn on the light, they lay on the bed, their hands gently entwined like swaying seaweed in warm, shallow water. Mina thought about what Lázaro had said – that every love has to reconcile with its past – and found in his words a transitory feeling of peace.

“Christmas in Paris must be fun.” Lázaro whispered as if they were no longer alone by themselves.


End file.
